On Tue, Mar 5, 2019 at 2:50 AM Dave Chinner <da...@fromorbit.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Mar 04, 2019 at 05:04:23PM +0200, Amir Goldstein wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 4, 2019 at 4:44 PM <fdman...@kernel.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > From: Filipe Manana <fdman...@suse.com>
> > >
> > > Test that if we truncate a file to reduce its size, rename it and then
> > > fsync it, after a power failure the file has a correct size and name.
> > >
> >
> > I am not sure that ext4/xfs semantics guaranty anything about
> > persisting file name after fsync of file?...
>
> They do. It's that pesky "strictly ordered metadata" thing I keep
> having to explain to people...
>
> i.e. if you fsync an inode, then you are persisting all the changes
> needed to reference that file and it's data. And so if there was a
> rename in the history of that file, then that is persisted, too.
> Which means that both the original and the new directory
> modifications are persisted, too.
>
> *POSIX* doesn't require this - it says that if you O_DSYNC data,
> then it also includes all the metadata needed to reference that
> data. So even if the data is there, POSIX doesn't define whether the
> rename is there or noti, just that you can get to the fsync'd data
> via either the old or new name. IOWs, POSIX allows the behaviour to
> be implementation specific.
>
> In this case, file systems with strictly ordered metadata will end
> up making the rename visible because the rename occurred before the
> truncate that the fsync() is persisting...
>
That is not what is happening in Filipe's test. Test has:
- ftruncate A
- fsync A
- rename A B
- fsync B
So the reason this is working is because 2nd fsync needs to
persist ctime of B and not because it needs to persist the
truncate.
XFS does it, but it doesn't seem like something that any
filesystem is guaranteed to do the same:
/*
* We always want to hit the ctime on the source inode.
*
* This isn't strictly required by the standards since the source
* inode isn't really being changed, but old unix file systems did
* it and some incremental backup programs won't work without it.
*/
xfs_trans_ichgtime(tp, src_ip, XFS_ICHGTIME_CHG);
So for the purpose of the test itself, which needs to guaranty that
btrfs persists the size, fsync of parent would be more robust for
any filesystem.
Thanks,
Amir.
